Smartphones have become a necessary and ubiquitous part of every person's life. In addition to being used as a means for communication, e.g., e-mail, texting, and telephone conversations, smartphones are routinely used as a source of entertainment. For example, it is not uncommon for people to use a smartphone to consume various forms of media, such as music, video content, and audio books.
Most people will protect their smartphones by applying a protective cover or casing to the phone. These protective casings may be hard or soft, and will often encapsulate and serve to protect the phone from damage that may arise from dropping the phone. While these existing protective casings do provide some level of protection from mechanical damage, the casings often do not protect the phone from water damage. With respect to the few currently-available cases that purport to be waterproof, those cases often do not provide a suitable means for allowing the audio content that is generated by the phone to leave the case for a user to consume. In some cases, it may be desirable for a user to operate a smartphone in wet conditions, e.g., in the shower or bath, while being able to hear and interpret the audio content that is generated by the smartphone.
In view of the foregoing, it would be advantageous to provide a protective chamber that may be used to hold and protect the smartphone that is not only waterproof, but is also configured to enable a user to hear and interpret the audio content that is generated by the smartphone (e.g., the audio content included within a song, video, or audio book). In addition, it would be advantageous to provide a protective smartphone chamber, which not only enables a user to consume the audio content that is generated by the smartphone, but is also configured to amplify such audio content (since the environment in which the smartphone may be used will often exhibit a higher background level of noise, e.g., a shower or bathtub). Still further, it would be advantageous to provide a protective smartphone chamber, which not only exhibits the above features, but is also configured to accommodate a smartphone by itself—or a smartphone that is already equipped with its own protective casing—such that the waterproof chamber will only be needed when the environment requires it. These features would be particularly useful when a person wishes to use a smartphone during a shower or bath, and wishes to simply drop the smartphone into an acoustic waterproof chamber as described above.
As the following will demonstrate, the present invention addresses many of these needs and others.